Thanks to my PC Gamer magazine, I learned that Life is Strange 2 is coming out soon. Or is it the prequel? Oh, who cares. It’s the second game in the series made by the same people. I finished the first game about a year ago, only on a few of sittings. Ya, it’s not a long game. It’s an interactive, choice-making game that kind of resembles the Walking Dead game series. There are five episodes all together but you can play through them quite quickly once you know what kind of choices you want to make.

You play as Max, a college girl dealing with regular youth drama who just discovers that she has power to rewind time. Which means, playing as her, you can also rewind the choice you just made and go with a different direction if the first one doesn’t work out for you.

However, with each choice that you make, you will end up with different outcomes or consequences, as what this game calls them. For example, you see a girl getting bullied. You can choose to not help her but that might damage you in the long run. Or you can choose to rewind time and help her instead, which will piss off the bullies and give you a different outcome. You can’t exactly win in this type of game. You can try to make a choice for the “best” outcome that you think but then it always turns something else upside down. The best way is to play through it like a “what would you do” kind of situation. And play through again with different choices that you made in the first try and see what would happen instead. Since your character can rewind time, you probably will never settle with the first thing you say or the first choice you may. It’s kind of cheat of course. But whenever you’re playing other choice-making games, you would find yourself saying, “oh, shit. I wish I haven’t done that.” In Life is Strange, you don’t have to wish, just gotta rewind.

Now, the story is very fresh. In the beginning, it felt very much like typical high school drama. Unpopular vs popular, jocks vs nerds kind of situation. A girl has recently gone missing. Max is dreaming about a massive storm while reuniting with her childhood best friend, Chloe. Along the way, you can read Max’s personal diary, take photos of people dancing like idiots, meet new people, make conversation choices, make breakfast choices and rewind the shit out of every choice you make. Which by the way, you don’t ever find out why/how you have this ability. I guess that’s why you have the Prequel? For me, it didn’t get interesting until the end of Chapter 4, when the hidden villain in the end, which I didn’t expect to be whoever it is at all.

The whole Chapter 5 felt intense. It was very well done. But they end it up with you making a choice of your life. Okay, I get it. It’s the end so they gotta give you something. But what about the choices I made throughout the game? None of that meant ape-shit by the time you get to the end. I thought I initially got to that point is because of the stupid choices I made in the game. I went on a second play-through but end up with the same choices in the end. I finally looked it up and it turned out, it doesn’t matter what kind of choices you made throughout the game. You will always end up with the same ending choices. You choice one of the two, and you will watch the outcome of your choice and the game ends and leaves you wondering what the other end is. And no, you don’t get to rewind this time. The credit is too long, you can’t rewind pass all of that shit, you’ll get bloody nose. Wooo….bloody nose. That’s serious ok. So I’ll think the only way to see the other end is to replay the entire chapter or watch it on Youtube. That’s what I should’ve done. I got really bored replaying it the second time knowing how it would end. Knowing that you can’t change the ending no matter what, that’s what’s sucks about it. I still enjoyed it though. Hopefully second game is better. I don’t think so you get to rewind this time.

I saw someone playing this game on Twitch. I liked the art style of it and decided to give it a go for myself. It’s appears to be a very casual, point-and-click game and you can choose to play between a boy and a girl. It really no matter who you choose in the beginning, because you can simply change between characters whenever you wish.

The story unfolds as you progress with the game. Nothing is thrown at you in the beginning. Ya, I don’t like stuff being thrown at me. Anyhow, you’ll slowly find out that the girl is being sacrificed along with few other girls to a fly with no wings looking monster who’s being terrorizing everyone in exchange to the safety of her entire village. The boy lives on a space ship with his smothering and over-protective mother, dying to participate in anything dangerous. How do these two people connect? I thought to myself quite often during the first act of this game. I really didn’t know how there’ll be any connection of the sort. It took me awhile to find the answer to that question. And it simply amazed me when the two characters finally cross the path. I will not spoil anything as usual. But it definitely took me by surprise. Like damn, I didn’t see that coming.

After the first act, there’s couple of more hours of gameplay for ACT 2 and 3, if you take your time or don’t really know what to do like how I was. I got stuck a few times and not sure where to go or who to talk to. The game doesn’t offer hints but the characters do give you small hints every now and then. Might just have to try/use/combine all the items in your inventory in order to figure it out. No matter what you do, your character can’t die. He/she might just call you an idiot in the game but it’s okay nobody else knows. Like, “Oh! I didn’t know I was supposed to throw that squirrel at the dog, so he can go chase after it and leave his bone behind so I can pick it up and use it as a back-scratcher”. Ya, this is not in THIS game, k. But you know what I’m talking about. Troubles you run into when playing a point-and-click leveled puzzle game. So I finally finished it. The ending was kind of weak for my taste. It sort of just ends. Doesn’t necessarily do justice to the awesomeness of the plot of this game. But that’s just my opinion. What do you think?

It only took me couple of hours to finish this fairly new game. Not beat. Finish. It’s an interactive game that you do no more than walking around from point A to point B, opening doors and picking up things. There’s no enemy, no danger. You simply follow through the game as it prompts you. I would understand the high rating on this game, as it does have an interesting and deep story line to it. You play as a 17 year-old girl who’s the last remaining member of the Finch family, as every other of her family members had died at young ages. You go back to the old home where everything started, discovers every family member’s old rooms and learn the secrets and reasons behind their deaths. When I started the game, I didn’t really know what to expect. I usually enjoy solving puzzles or shooting something at someone in a game but I chose to follow through this game because of the story. It’s interesting to learn how generations and generations of people in the same family dies in every possible death you can think of. Ya, that’s a fragment sentence right there. Maybe run-on, too. But that’s how simple yet complicated the story is. I like how the game unfold things. It doesn’t cram you all the information in the beginning but it slowly unfolds itself as you go on. Stories are also told in different forms, like poetry, comic strips, letters and diary entries to avoid boring you. And you get to do something interactive from the first or third-person view with every story. So you learn from your own eyes about those unfortunate deaths. You will reach the end once you learn about every family member’s death. Then you’ll learn about yourself and the reason why you’re doing all of this. The game gives me an ending that left me wondering, which I won’t be writing it here of course. I really wasn’t sure what I got out of it, or what the game wanted me to get out of. Maybe it was just for the experience of a good storytelling.

This game was crowdfunded by either Kickstarter or Indiegogo I’m not sure which. I encountered it when it was still undergoing development. I had the chance to play part of it that the developer released that act like a teaser. It was quite enjoyable.

Your character is a cute, little mouse. Of course in the game-play itself your character blows up to human size so you can see him better. Or it’s us who get smaller. Your pick.

The game starts off with no explanation of what you supposed to do. No story. No background. No words slowly scrolling up like Starwar intro. I don’t know if that’s what the game developer intended to be or just didn’t add that in yet, but I really dig the factor of unknown. I don’t like when everything is presented to you in the very beginning when you don’t even give two shits about it yet.

Anyhow, all you know is, your character, Tilo, is locked up in jail and you try to gather all the shit around you and make attempt to escape stealthily. Because the game focuses on stealth, your character Tilo isn’t equipped with ability to fight. When you encounter an enemy mouse, all you can do is run like the wind and hide like a scaredy-cat, or mouse. Your health and stamina uses the same meter. Which means, when you’re low on health, you can’t exactly run like Forest. For a stealth game, it was probably done on purpose so you won’t be able to just run past every enemy. That’s no fun.

It took me a few hours to complete all the available main missions and also all of the side missions. Then the game went to black and the screen tells you the rest of the game is still underdevelopment. I encountered a few glitches during the gameplay and I had to restart the game, which is understandable considering that was only supposed to be a beta. I’m sure they’ll be patched up by the time the official game releases, which is probably gonna be awhile till. There’s only one main developer. It’s going to be quite sometimes to make a game with such details.